Month: October 2013

The ISILaunch03 shipment was loaded on a chartered Antonov-12 and is ready to go and fly to Ul’yanovsk, where customs clearance into Russia will be done. From there the aircraft will fly on to Orsk and the shipments will be transported by truck to Yasny launch base.

After months of preparation of hardware and documentation, the day had finally come that all hardware for ISILaunch03, gathered at ISL’s facility in Delft, was to be shipped out. In total 16 cases (8 cases containing ISIPODs and the CubeSats and 8 cases containing GSE) left the building for Amsterdam …

The Faculty of Aerospace Engineering of the Delft University of Technology, the developer of Delfi-n3Xt, has their own cleanroom, where all activities up to today have taken place. There the FM-satellite was also integrated into ‘its’ ISIPOD FM-27. As this Faculty is located literally right across the road from ISL’s facility, the manager of the Delfi-n3Xt project …

Following the successful integration of three 1U CubeSats (HiNCube, FUNcube-1 and ZACUBE-1) into 3U ISIPOD FM-21, another 3U ISIPOD was to be filled with three 1U CubeSats. Proceeding this integration, checkout activities on First-MOVE (Germany), UWE-3 (Germany) and Velox-PII (Singapore) were performed. As all three satellites already had a high level of flight-readiness, only minor …

Following the checkout on the two 3U KHUSATs, it was time for the teams of HiNCube (Norway), FUNcube-1 (AMSAT-UK) and ZACUBE-1 (South Africa) to perform their activities. The checkout of HiNCube (which had been stored at ISL’s cleanroom facility for considerable time and was battery-charged on regular intervals) took quite some effort, but yielded …

This launch blog will cover the final phases of the launch arrangements of quite a number of CubeSats on a Dnepr launch vehicle. The initial planning and arrangements for this launch already started from early 2011. Due to a launch delay however, for programmatic reasons related to the Dnepr launch …